Comfort Food Is In Taste Of Beholder

MARCOVITZ

I don't like it either, so that makes two of us. What's more, I suspect the number of people who don't like Jell-O might even be higher than that.

Whenever my wife makes it for dessert, I pass. The last time I ate Jell-O, I was 24 hours from a lower gastrointestinal X-ray. The radiologist gave me a list of things I could eat, and Jell-O was on it. So I ate Jell-O and eventually decided that the barium they made me drink the next day tasted better.

(The diagnosis was diverticulosis, in case you absolutely have to know. I feel better now.)

Back to Jell-O. I read in the paper that the makers of the wiggly glop are celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. So I contacted the people at Kraft Foods, which manufactures the stuff, and they sent me the complete history of Jell-0.

It was invented in 1897 by Pearl Wait (a guy, believe it or not) who added fruit to gelatin. Pearl's wife May named it Jell-O. Wait took out a patent on the gunk, but couldn't make a go of it. So he sold the rights to Jell-O for $450 to his neighbor, O.F. Woodward, who knew a good thing when he saw it. By 1925, Woodward's company was selling $67 million worth of Jell-O a year. O.F. Woodward died rich. History doesn't record what became of Pearl Wait.

I'll skip over the next 72 years of corporate history and bring you right up to date. According to Kraft, more than 1.1 million servings of Jell-O are eaten every day. Kraft says three out of four American homes contain at least one box of Jell-O and, in fact, 99 out of 100 Americans can look at a plate of Jell-O and identify it as Jell-O.

Well, I found this all very hard to believe. Regardless of what Kraft says, I don't think anybody likes Jell-O. After all, that's why they had to hire Bill Cosby to sell it.

So I decided to check with some Jell-O experts, and that's why I called Laura Dougherty, who is food services manager at St. Luke's Quakertown Hospital.

Dougherty told me Jell-O is served to people on clear liquid diets and to tonsillectomy patients, although people who have just lost their tonsils aren't allowed to eat strawberry Jell-O because if the doctor examines them after dinner he may think their throats are bleeding.

As for the others on pure liquid diets, Dougherty said they are fed Jell-O because it is easily digested and because it contains a lot of sugar which provides the fuel they aren't getting from the broth and tea and juice and whatever else they are allowed to eat.

I asked Dougherty what she thinks of Jell-O.

"I hate Jell-O," she said. "I'm not a good Jell-O eater. I work in a kitchen so I can eat anything I want so why would I eat Jell-O? I like doughnuts."

Next, I called Beverly Alderfer, clinical nutrition manager at Grand View Hospital in Sellersville. Alderfer described Jell-O as a "comfort food."

"What's so comforting about Jell-O?" I asked, somewhat incredulously.

"It makes you feel good to eat it," she said. "You may remember when your mother fed it to you, and how when you were sick it made you feel well."

Then, she talked about the simple carbohydrates in Jell-O and how it has "macronutritional" value and how it is part of a "transitional diet" and so on. She also told me that nobody at Grand View is forced to eat it, and that patients who are on unrestricted diets usually have a choice for dessert that may include Jell-0 along with frozen yogurt, mousse or fruit cobbler.

I asked Alderfer if she likes Jell-O. No, she admitted, she doesn't.

That makes three of us!

"But I'm not going to take it away from the people who do like it," she quickly added.